Aaron Smith, from “Boston”

I watched two men press hard into each other, their bodies caught in the club’s bass drum swell, and I couldn’t remember when I knew I’d never be beautiful, but it must have been quick and subtle, the way the holy ghost can pass in and out of a room. I want so desperately to be finished with desire, the rushing wind, the still small voice.

I love writing. I thought, “I’ll be a news writer.” That was why I went to grad school.

This is why I quit grad school: I learned that there are only four stories and there’s only one way to tell each but no matter what pen I used, new stories came out, seditious and unwieldy, and I still can’t stop finding new ways to tell them.

This is why I correct typos for a living while others depict glorious international events in black, white and read Virginia Woolf the other day; she said for a woman to write, she must first kill the angel in the house.

The grad school chair was too alive to be an angel, but given another chance I’d fix that and drive a red ball-point like a stake through his shriveled black heart and watch the ink run out then wash my hands.

I still read. I read all the time. I read the newspaper. On the bus. Over the shoulder. Of the person sitting in front of me. Today, it’s Wednesday but the paper’s stuck on Sunday. You’ve got to figure, though, with the speed of information these days, it was out of date on Sunday even for speed readers, outmoded even before the ink was dry and here’s the headline: NIGHTMARE IN BAGHDAD: A WOMAN SEARCHES FOR THE TRUTH ABOUT THE GULF WAR.

Do you believe everything you read? Do you believe anything you read in the newspaper? Teen Pregnancy Up, Moral Decay in America Up, Rate of Incarceration of Black Males Up, Dear Beth, Why can’t he get it up? So, there’s a NIGHTMARE in Baghdad. Wake up and the nightmare’s gone It’s not like it affects property values here in Baghdad-by-the-Bay and it’s about a woman anyway and it’s in the newspaper and she’s looking for what really happened to her son or something like that I’m sure because it’s a woman and women are only news when they have sons or husbands or they’re dead and I’m sure he’s not really dead since no one ever really dies in press rhetoric and anyway it’s only one woman “searching” for the “truth” so she’s obviously a kook or a martyr or both and we can make her disappear by turning a page we can make thousands of deaths disappear by talking about collateral damage we can make thousands of deaths disappear by not writing about them at all; wasn’t Bosnia last year?

It’s hard to turn the page of a newspaper on the bus. You hit the elbow of whoever is sitting next to you, jostle the hair of the woman putting on eyeliner in front of you. It’s messy, yes, and difficult, but a search for a story, even just one, is like that keep turning those pages next page

Headline: 70 YEARS AFTER SUFFRAGE: WHAT DO WOMEN WANT Why don’t you go ask the angel in the house? All she’s doing is reading Cosmo, which won’t cover AIDS since women aren’t really at risk no one really dies in the glossy pages with perfume strips and why dwell on that when you could be talking about seven ways to drive him wild in bed or six ways to flatten your stomach or five ways to love your body (as long as he loves it) or four ways to dress for dinner or three new hairstyles or two pages about knowing when it’s over or one story that the angel knows as she lies on her bed, looking so pretty. All stretched out, wearing her high, high ivory pedestal heels. Look at her pretty painted mouth twist in an O as I pluck her wings feather by feather—it’s painful, yes, but I guess it’s going to be like that— and I pull a feather and she’s saying there’s a story— that one about the woman who bit an apple and ruined the world and I pull a feather and she’s crying that in the beginning there was the father, the son and something invisible and I yank a handful of feathers and she screams that in the beginning there was the law, the father and I shove the feathers in her mouth and tell her, quietly, that here is the beginning and we have a murder, a motive and a body of evidence that here is the beginning and we have blank walls to write on that here is the beginning and we have blood.

—Daphne Gottlieb, “Death and the Maiden and the Information Age” (Pelt, Odd Girls Press, 1999)

Richard Siken, "You Are Jeff"

“Icarus.”

it's all about freedom really

Credit goes to An Sifakah for the poem. Enjoy!

Support me on Ko-fi maybe?

it’s their’s to burn

sharing a cigarette with joan of arc - dante émile ( @orpheuslament ) // photography by brendon burton

working at a grocery store has only made me even angrier about inflation and how food, water, and shelter isnt free

like just looking at groceries (not water or shelter) i see just a few bags (maybe around 5 or so) of food costing over $125 USD regularly. I've seen orders upwards of $600. and sure those have been bigger orders but no food should cost that much.

my coworkers and i shouldn't be complaining about the price of food when we get employee discounts.

a single bag of food for myself (usually containing some small pizzas, crackers, milk, and cereal) regularly costs between $50-60. minimum wage in my state is 15/HR. thats about four hours of work for one bag of food

a coworker who works on the front end of our store prides herself on being able to catch theives. everyone says how good she is at it. and sometimes it makes sense, sometimes people are just stealing to steal. but how do you ever know?

when the card reader we take outside is broken we are supposed to have the customers come inside to pay for their groceries if they're paying with EBT. there's a woman who's a regular who has a few small children and when she comes to pick up groceries they're usually asleep in the car.

am i supposed to make her choose between leaving her children alone in the car or waking them up and taking them inside?

four hours of work for one bag of groceries. is this not also theft?

four hours of work. let that sink in. four hours for one small bag of groceries.

we aren't supposed to accept tips but if we don't accept tips then how else are we supposed to afford our groceries?

i haven't seen a single person stealing food. you cannot steal whats already stolen.

although im no longer a christian, the teachings of my childhood have stuck with me, and in the bible it says "When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Leave them for the poor and for the foreigner residing among you."

society has reaped right up the the very edge and beyond of its fields, so it's up to us to reap what we can

four hours of work for one bag of food

I’m okay.

it’s getting bad again

john bull's other island and major barbara (1907) - george bernard shaw

"dont be scraed"

"Salamander" poem from "Violet Bent Backwards over the Grass" by Lana del Rey ♡

james is very fascinated by muggle cameras. lily and regulus notice this of course and lily pitches an idea: to get james a camera for his birthday. they save up the money they need for a higher quality camera and wrap it up in a fancy box and present it to him on his birthday. the smile james gives them is worth every penny they spent.

they expected the obsession that came after. james took his camera everywhere, always taking pictures, not just of the the scenery or himself, but of his friends and family and most importantly of lily and regulus. what they didn't expect was that james had all of their photos printed and compiled them into an album, decorated it and drew little hearts and stars and flowers on it and wrote down little notes of what had happened the day the photos were taken. he revealed this album to them on their anniversary as a shared gift.

some of the many pictures james has taken of his lovers:

Rick Barot, from The Galleons (Milkweed Editions, 2020)

The Names

Now it’s time for the lilac, blazon of spring, the prince of plants, whose name I know only when it blooms.

The blooms called forth by a bare measure of warmth, days that are more chill than warm, though the roots must

know, and the leaves, and the spindly trunks ganged up by the trash bins behind our houses. The blue pointillism

in morning fog. The blue that is lavender. The blue that is purple. The smell that is the air’s sugar, the sweet

weight when you put your face near, the way you would put it near the side of someone’s head. Here the ear.

Here the nape. Here the part of flesh that has no name at all, the part that is shining because it has slipped naming.

In the crumbling photo album, the dead toddler on a bier, dead for decades, whose name I now carry. On another

page, the old man, also decades gone, whose same name I now carry. The name a fossil, the calcium radiance

that I bear and will eventually give up. Again it’s time for the lilacs. The quiet beautiful things at the sides of the

rec center parking lot. The purple surge by the freeway. The sprigs I cut from the shrub leaning toward me

from the neighbor’s yard, taking them at night because I shouldn’t be taking them. The blooms that are a genius

on the kitchen table, awful because I want to eat them with my terrible eyes, with my terrible hands. The awful

lilacs, the brief lilacs, the sweet. Here is the recklessness I have wanted. Here is the composure I have earned.

The Little Towns of West Texas

know all the roads go somewhere else and never come back. They know Heaven is directly above them and from it comes great suffering. In their fierce localities they suffer without complaint. They believe in their names and in the Holy Ghost whose tongues of fire surround them.

They are covered with cotton silt, insulated from the cold and the world as if wearing a coat of frost all year. They are mirages of mica shimmering in the distance, moving always ahead of the traveler. No stranger can enter them, no native can leave.

Their seasons are summer and winter, the hot wind and the cold. Spring avoids them and goes a different way. At night the wind spins them upward into the darkness. At dawn it drops them back to earth in no particular order. If a house is found closer to the road or at a different angle, nobody notices. The horizon is always the same. The wind flays everything equally.

Near the graveyards of the little towns of West Texas beer cans are crucified on fence posts and shot full of holes The wind plays them like flutes. Coyotes answer with voices that could wake the dead. But the dead sleep on, having everything they ever wanted, a cool, dark place to rest where the wind cannot rattle the lids of their coffins and the sun no longer torments them.

Their mouths are pale crescent moons drawn down over teeth they paid for and intend to keep. They await no other transfiguration, having heard a voice roaring out of the desert and it was not a comfort to them. Now they sleep without dreams, rocked by the rhythm of the pump’s heartbeat and the faint susurrus of oil sliding like from beneath them.

—Richard Shelton (x)

I think I was too young for all these things

"it's so embarrassing you like that popular thing" "oh ew that geeky/strange thing is so cringe lol" "oh it's kind of weird you get excited about that harmless shit"

dude i love how ironic and jaded you are and that's so cool and sexy of you. and i am so so glad to tell you - you won!! we all had a meeting and we decided that you won, and we are writing your name on the inside of a burger king crown. the marker smeared, sorry, but we knew any form of real effort is ugly to you. but anyway. congrats! you are officially the coolest, most ironic, most jaded person in-the-world-right-now. we would throw you a party but you would think it was totally boring - and besides, we're weird so we wouldn't have been coming. we would have brought our love of beetles and of baking and of little canapes. we would have brought our artsy videogames and pages of writing. we would have written a poem with you, our hands covered in ink, and spread out a canvas to dance on, the night so lurid and pink.

but do not worry. we will not throw the party. we will just get you a ringlight and that crown i mentioned. it is a nice crown, except for where one of us dropped it.

the vote was a really hard one because we had so many cool ironic people to pick off the shelves. all of you have hands that rot fruit, how strange is that - you can't look at something without destroying it for other people. you like it when you can squeeze a person into a pinpoint - all us small ones scampering our little feet around our ugly joys. the vote was also a hard one because we kept our voices down because you don't like it when we talk too loud. you were on your phone at the time, talking to people other than us. you are a ghoul of every moment - half in, half out, you resent us for being here without shame or embarrassment.

so good news! we have invented an island for people like you. you get to go there and speak into the air things like if you still like watching harmless twitch streamers in 2023 you're fucking boring. you will say things like liveplay podcasts are fucking ugly and it's kind of awkward they try to make everything gay. on the island we made you, all of your words will have weight. they will form in the air like icicles, large white behemoth letters that will crumple in anvils around your feet. maybe we will send someone there once in a while to sweep, but honestly you might be there for a while, alone, waiting. we are busy being outside looking for mushrooms and flapping our hands and humming. we are busy kicking our little heels while we watch cringey tv. we are busy - sorry! as an apology, we have pre-filled the island with every bland, mediocre, unscented thing we could find. the island has the texture of american cheese. the island has an ocean that never gets angry. the island is perfect for you, trust me. you will be so happy there - as happy as you can be, ironically.

we want to say we are sorry for doing harmless things that you find annoying, childish, or unappealing - but we are not sorry. we thought we could help you, because we don't mind laughing at ourselves, but it turns out you are allergic to color and noise and atmosphere, so this is the best that we can do for now. we are all making a big shirt that says i voted in the ironic monarchy. we got you one that is just a fast fashion buttondown. i am so excited for you and this island and the big life you have won. you have a cool jaded grey life and miles of irony to roam. i love you! be well.

now leave us alone.

Would you travel to another dimension to taste my lips,

Would you love me for a lifetime where others have left in few minutes.

Would you be mine and breathe life into me,

As I'm wandering in this limbo my skin feels numb and my eyes can't see.